California Attorney General Jerry Brown on Tuesday urged a San Jose federal judge to allow the execution of a condemned Riverside County killer to proceed on schedule Thursday night, arguing that the state's newly revised lethal injection procedure and updated San Quentin death chamber comply with legal standards established two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In court papers filed with U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, state lawyers and prison officials tried to counteract concerns that California's lethal injection method has not undergone enough court review to permit Albert Greenwood Brown to be executed at 9 p.m. Thursday. The state even invited Fogel to tour the new lethal injection chamber in the next day to provide assurances on how an execution can be carried out humanely.

Albert Brown's lawyers, meanwhile, blasted the state for rushing to execute Brown before Fogel has an opportunity to review the state's new lethal injection procedures and for trying to squeeze the fatal event in before California runs out of one of the main drugs used to carry out a lethal injection.

"This entire fiasco is brought about by (the state), which sought execution dates precipitously just to get some, or at least one, execution done quickly," Brown's lawyers told Fogel.

A federal appeals court Monday night ordered Fogel to re-examine Brown's case, rejecting his ruling last week that would have paved the way for the execution to proceed. State prison officials are under an unprecedented deadline to carry the execution out by Friday, when California will run out of one of the three drugs used in executions and be forced to push back Brown's execution date until at least early next year.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called it "incredible" that Brown's fate is being decided on a deadline linked to the "expiration date of the execution drug," and said Fogel had overstepped his authority by giving the death row inmate a choice of being executed by a single dose of an anesthetic or the state's preferred three-drug lethal cocktail. Brown refused to make that choice and appealed Fogel's order.

Among other things, the appeals court demanded that Fogel determine whether California's revised lethal injection procedures address his own concerns in a 2006 ruling that found the state's previous execution method flawed and a risk to cause a cruel and inhumane execution.

The appeals court also ordered Fogel to evaluate whether the new procedures, coupled with the newly constructed death chamber, would hold up under a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Kentucky's similar lethal injection protocol.

In court papers, the attorney general's lawyers focused on a passage in the Supreme Court decision that said "a state with a lethal injection protocol substantially similar" to Kentucky's would not pose a "substantial risk" of an inmate suffering severe pain during an execution, and thus would be presumed to have a legal execution method. State lawyers also stressed that the California procedures are much different than when Fogel halted executions in 2006, including a requirement that an inmate be deemed unconscious before the final two drugs can be administered.

Critics of lethal injection say those two drugs can mask an inmate's agonizing pain before death. In court papers filed Tuesday, Brown's lawyers say the new regulations are just a recast version of the old ones found inadequate by Fogel four years ago.

Albert Greenwood Brown, on death row since 1982 for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, would be the first inmate executed in California in nearly five years and the 14th since the state resumed the death penalty in 1978.

State officials disclosed Monday that even if Brown is executed, there will not be more executions in California until next year because the prison system has run out of sodium thiopental, the first drug administered in an execution that renders an inmate unconscious.

The Illinois-based maker of the drug has said it will not have a supply of the drug until early next year, a factor that has also put off executions in other states such as Oklahoma and Kentucky.

In addition to Fogel's court, Brown's fate is also being considered in other forums. The state courts are reviewing a separate legal challenge to the way the state adopted its new lethal injection procedures, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is considering his bid for clemency.